Numbers tell Republicans they’d better make a deal: Opinion

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, flanked by Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, left, and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of Calif., speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday. Following a closed-door GOP meeting, they announced that House Republicans will advance legislation to temporarily extend the government's ability to borrow money to meet its financial obligations. (Photo by J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

The latest word out of Washington, D.C., is that House Republicans are offering legislation to avert a credit default and end the partial government shutdown in exchange for cuts in benefit programs.

The Associated Press is reporting that the deal would also ease the sequestration spending cuts and replace them with reductions in benefit programs, such as raising the cost of Medicare for well-off beneficiaries.

Why all the wheeling and dealing all of a sudden after threats to send the nation over the fiscal cliff of defaulting on our credit?

Perhaps the GOP is looking at the numbers, two of them in particular: their own vanishing poll ratings, and the Dow Jones index.

A NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out Thursday showed that the GOP’s favorable rating had dropped to 24 percent, the lowest figure ever in that poll and four points lower than in September. President Obama was viewed favorably by 47 percent, up two points from last month, and Democrats overall were at 39 percent.

Stocks had decline steadily since mid-September as investors worried about Washington’s gridlock and the U.S. possibly defaulting on its debts for the first time in history. But Thursday, after Republicans offered to extend the government’s borrowing authority for something between six weeks and three months, the Dow Jones industrial average shot up 323 points, its biggest rise of the year.

If it rises that much and that fast on mere talk of not defaulting, just imagine how quickly and deeply it will fall if the U.S. government does default. House Republicans must have imagined it, and most of them decided they couldn’t take the chance.